Our most important problems

All problems are parochial. What does this mean? It means there is no universal problem. There is no problem that has existed and will exist for all time for everyone and everything. Can there be problems that exist for all of humanity? Also no: the people in the past are now in an unproblematic state: i.e death. (following Deutsch, 2011). Problems are problems for a time, for a person or for many people (maybe sometimes all of us). But what is this thing about problems being conflicts between ideas? Surely a problem is out there in the world? No, it is always in our mind at the level of our ideas. So, for example, you may think that as you look out over the beautiful yet distressing view from your home - at the rising water from river through the torrential rain is a problem “out there”. But no: it’s a problem for you. It’s not a problem for the river. Nor indeed the house you are in for the house is uncaring and unthinking. The only one to care for the house is you. Should the house be flooded - that too is your problem. The problem of a “rising river” possibly flooding your home is only a problem because, apparently, you lack a solution. Imagine a distant future where you are even more wealthy than just so wealthy you can afford a lovely house by a river: imagine a world where you have a great high wall that, at the press of a button, rises to 20 meters in height, encircling your home like some great modern, yet medieval castle defence - impenetrable even to the flood waters. Suddenly, rising rivers are no problem for you. You have no “conflict of ideas”. You merely press the button on your remote control that says “raise” and the walls raise with no more fuss than the garage door might.

All problems are like this. Even problems of the so-called “extinction level event” types (or existential threat types). It is when we do not have a solution that it is a problem. Or when we have competing purported solutions in which case, that is a problem about how best to decide and move forward. But are there really existential threats/civilization ending possibilities? Yes: and in all cases the solutions are unknown and thus require more knowledge to solve. But knowledge does not come cheap. It needs to be funded. You may be an artist and your problem is how to create better art. You want to learn. But paint and canvas is not free. You need more wealth and should you gain more to improve your art, perhaps you can then sell your higher quality art and earn more wealth and so the cycle continues. But we digress: what about the truly global, even cosmic problems?

Existential Angst

We must expect any number of global civilization ending catastrophes could befall us. We know of when none of them will strike except that, in theory, some must eventually occur. But for “fun” (genuinely: many people find it exhilarating to consider all the ways humanity might be destroyed - this is why disaster movies tend to do so well at the box office) here are some science fiction examples that are nonetheless not prohibited by any law of physics and which could occur:

Asteroid impact. A genuine classic of the genre. It is well known asteroids routinely (on cosmological or even just geological time scales) strike the Earth. 5 times in the history of life on this planet it has been near extinguished (or rather some large proportion of species has been extinguished). At least some of these were caused by asteroids. Indeed no life at all was possible on Earth early on because of the so called “Late Heavu Bombardment” which perfectly steralised the surface of the planet with molten rock. But the most famous impact is, of course, the “KT event”: the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs (and indeed 75% of all species). We should expect asteroids from either within our solar system or beyond to one day cross the orbit of the Earth at the wrong time and, if it is not deflected, would indeed kill everyone as the atmosphere is obliterated for centuries.

A nearby supernovae. There are no candidates at the moment that might exterminate life on Earth but eventually one must go off in our neighbourhood and - of course this is said on the basis of our best astrophysics in 2020. There could well be stellar processes we are unaware of that could cause some kind of explosion unforeseen. Who knows if Sirius just 8.6 light years distant might suddenly go bang? It shouldn’t according to all we know. But what *do* we know?

The Sun for that matter. Small changes in the output of the Sun could have catastrophic consequences for Earth

Star collision. Most stars are unlike the Sun in that they are far closer to other stars in pairs or trios or huge clusters. Stars can and do collide. The basis of the detection of gravity waves has simply been the most extreme cases of dead stars - black holes and neutron stars colliding. If that happened nearby in our galaxy, the resulting radiation from the explosion could easily blow the atmosphere of Earth away.

A virus with R0 = 35 and a fatality rate of 100%. We are all too familiar now with what far lower numbers mean for the world.

A herbicidal plague that destroys the overwhelming majority of crops and other plants.

Supervolcanos

Earthquakes and tsunamis far larger than any in the last 5000 years.

These are all possible. But these are known. None of these keep me awake at night but what I do sometimes entertain myself with as I fall off to sleep is: those problems not yet known and not even imagined that could destroy us all. But let us entertain some wild fantasies: mindless Von Neuman probes that eat planets. Alien nanotechnology. Dark matter black holes. Whatever is more frightening than prions. A super toxic chemical that somehow gets into the rain. A neurotoxin produced by plants that causes people to die suddenly (see “The Happening” for that one).

There are so many problems known and an infinite number unknown that we need a diversity of approaches - many minds - to work upon them all and find solutions fast. And for that we need wealth - far more wealth. So we must foster the conditions under which knowledge grows and wealth grows too in lock step. Happily how best to foster those conditions is indeed known. But it is not well known. Why it is not well known is a mixture of various ideologies - various anti-rational memes. Ideas that disable the critical faculties and do not allow criticism of the bad idea. The solution is clear about how to maximise wealth and thus accelerate the creation of knowledge and prepare solutions not only for problems known but also to best prepare the world for problems yet to be encountered. What is this solution? To understand we must first turn to history and look at extinction-level problems we once had but solved. And how we solved them. What kind of problem was so great that, it seemed, no single person could solve it and only a coordinated central effort could bring about a resolution? There are many but here is one, surely prime among them: how to feed the world.

The anti-rational solution

The problem of how to feed people reliably and cure starvation used to be a terrible problem and in a sense remains a real problem just waiting once again to rear its head at any time. One solution, popular in many places for a time (and in fact still popular despite being roundly refuted over and again), was not to allow liberty (in the form of the free market) to solve this. It was, instead, to centrally plan and then coerce a solution onto the populace. Intellectuals with “the best ideas” - those in government and with power - would allocate land and then command farmers what to grow. This would be efficient and avoid waste. What was grown could then be redistributed so that no one got too much nor too little. This method was the method in ancient tribes, medieval times, and of course in China for decades. It remains largely the method in North Korea and some other rare places today. What went wrong? Putting aside examples deeper in history and looking squarely at China between 1959 and 1961 some 45 million people starved to death there. Was it drought? Pestilence? Plague? No, it was poor policy. It was force and coercion. It was not allowing individuals to solve this massive problem themselves. The problem was huge, after all. So many agreed with the “logic”: How could a nation possibly feed hundreds of millions of people by leaving it to the people to solve? To leave that to the individual surely meant chaos, disorder and a violent form of anarchy. The free market could not possibly solve a problem like that. It was far too important to be left to the masses. Central planning and experts were needed. It was simple. The government would tell you what to grow, where and when. When the time came for harvest, that good government would come along and take away your crops or cattle and in return, though you specialised in wheat or beef, you could go to the local distributor and there you would be given a bounty of rations of all kinds. Distributed from a central place, gathered from across the nation. What could go wrong?

Almost everything. Firstly, what motivates farmers to try harder and innovate? No innovation is permitted. If you are told “grow rice” then you grow rice. And if you are told to grow 100 pounds of rice then 100 pounds is what you shall grow. No more. Why try to grow more? You are not permitted to sell them and there is no reward for more. You do the minimum. You do not expand. You are not rewarded for harder labour. And, if the worst does happen - the rain does not come - you cannot diversify. The experts have deemed this is not permitted. The market is not free. You cannot have some wheat and some rice. Or some rice and some cattle. You must do as you are told.

Central planners cannot know what is going on “on the ground” as well as the locals. The problem of “how to feed the world” was not solved by a central government or some expert coming up with a global solution. It was the absence of the expert and central government except to the extent that the government protected the individual. That was the solution. Hands off by the government. Allow the people to do what they thought best in order to feed themselves. And, once allowed to feed themselves they grew more than needed because they could sell the surplus. The rice grower could sell their extra rice to the butcher who could sell extra beef to the baker who could sell extra bread to the carpenter who could build a new grainery for the rice grower. And so it went. And now there was no deficiency but a surplus. And that additional wealth could now be devoted to...hiring plumbers for sewerage works and cleaners to keep the streets well tended and doctors to treat the sick. And so the population increased and the world became better. And this is not just China but everywhere it is tried. Everywhere and for all problems always and without exception. Not immediately. Not without effort and energy. But eventually.

And yet, despite this crystalline refutation of central planning - of the very real knowledge that the free market solved this problem, the anti-rational solution has not gone away. The vast majority of the planet still believes, and intellectuals promote the notion that: The most important problems should not be left to the market. They are too big. Too difficult to coordinate. Hence also healthcare should not be left to the market. Roads cannot be left to the market. Space travel, education, provision of medical equipment, libraries, etc, etc, etc. Deep ideas, some from religion, some just passed on down since time immemorial before the written word, tell us that we must centrally plan. There must be a leader at the top to coordinate our response. There must be forced cooperation. Left alone, people will not help each other but must be forced to help. And if you criticise these notions you are a bad person. You are “selfish” or “blind to facts” or simply a “fool”. This is the anti-rational memeplex where though the solution is known, the solution has worked, and the opposing idea tested, then refuted, it persists. It has not died. And with each refutation, with each time the market is chained and the government unleashed, and a problem exacerbated, the cry goes up: it was lucky the authorities stepped in. In China was the government ever really blamed for the starvation of millions? Not really. Natural disasters were blamed. Much the same can be said for the North Korean famine (the so-called “arduous march”) from 1994 to 1998 when perhaps more than 2 million people died of starvation there. Natural disaster was blamed. And yet, in the South, life went on as normal despite their being “affected” by the same weather and climate. The difference between them was not the presence or not of natural disaster but ideas. One country was open to the world, diverse and less centrally planned. The other had a stance of “self-reliance” and did not think global trade was good and their farms: centrally planned. While South Korea allowed its farmers to grow whatever they wished and as much of it whenever they liked and to sell it wherever (including overseas) the North had the elites make those decisions. And the same tragedy befell that place as China decades earlier. The lessons are not learned. But perhaps food production and distribution is just an exception to the “most important problem” criteria free markets cannot solve.

But is there anything more important than feeding people? Some say space exploration is so important it is the thing that will save civilization eventually and so large a task it too cannot be left to the market. Neil deGrasse Tyson argued (famously in some circles now) that only the government can do space exploration effectively (rather like some argued only the government can do “food” effectively and only the government can do “healthcare” effectively). His “Penny4Nasa” campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny4NASA was about giving just a penny on a dollar (in other words 1% of the USA budget) to NASA. But why? Because he deemed that this was a better use of his neighbours’ money than they did to solve their problems. 1% does not seem like much but if all you have is $1 it’s a lot.

Put another way, if you are on a low income (say $500 a week) then 1% of that is $5 which still does not seem like much except that your budget that week was:Rent: $200Food: $150Electricity, Water, Transport: $50Internet, Phone, Entertainment: $50

So you have solved the problems of shelter, food and comfort to some extent but other problems loom. You’ve tattered clothes and no savings should something truly horrific happen, you need to fix failing lights in your home, your mother has a birthday coming up and more besides. Suddenly that $5 means everything to you. But Neil thinks you should donate it to his favorite project. Because he knows better as an intellectual - he knows that in the future the spin offs and the sense of wonder and how it will benefit civilization will all ultimately help you...eventually. He cares for you, don’t you know? He is wise and kind. You are blinkered in your thinking. Trust him: it will be ok eventually. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

This is rather the tone of “benevolent” philosopher kings.

Yet today we have SpaceX and Virgin Galaxy to name but two private companies doing as much as NASA. Can anyone doubt in the decades or centuries to come that private enterprise won’t be sending craft to other planets? That startups in India are already not doing likewise? The government in Australia has set up a nascent space agency - but the model is to act as a hub for encouraging private enterprise rather than assume the government can do this or is most effective in attempting to do so. NASA has done wonderful things and continues to do wonderful things. But NASA is the “centrally planned farming” of space exploration. It will indeed get something done: but diversification and private enterprise and rational self interest about these things will always create more wealth and opportunities than any committee of planners possibly could in the long run.

Don’t slay the goose

Eschewing the government in order to solve our most important problems does not mean large collaborative efforts cannot still occur or cannot emerge and be self sustaining. Food production and distribution was that and remains that. No one had to mandate anyone did anything in particular with respect to food - but people cooperated. Those who worked the plough with those who packed the grain, those who drove to the markets and those who baked the bread and so on. Who can really argue that the government would produce and distribute food better than what happens today with producers, supermarkets, fast food chains and all those little stores everywhere in every town?

Or consider mass communication. Would it be better if the government made smartphones and controlled every aspect of the internet? Is the internet helped or hindered by government? People engage sometimes in post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies when it comes to some large infrastructure projects. Only the government could do roads (and yet the best maintained roads are private toll roads) or only the government could do internet infrastructure (and yet most private telecommunications companies are the ones responsible for vast networks of fibre optic cables and 4g and 5g networks), or only the government can do mass public transport (yet Uber has caused prices to fall and quality to rise) and so on and on.

The argument from incredulity here goes: I have identified a problem and I simply cannot imagine how the free market could solve this. One’s failure of imagination is no refutation. If you cannot imagine a solution, what makes you think a government central planner will? Why not step aside, request the government lower its guns*, and allow innovative individuals to come up with solutions on the ground? The next solution may come from a local community coming up with new protocols, or a small team (or even the proverbial lone genius) working together on a solution in a lab, or in their basement, and the next thing is, they sell it to an entrepreneur who mass produces it.

The free market generates wealth. As David Deutsch has explained, wealth is not merely “amount of money in a bank account” it is “the repertoire of physical transformations (an entity) is capable of causing” (p 202, “The Beginning of Infinity”). This applies to individuals and communities and civilizations. We need much more wealth so that when a problem arises we can transform that problem situation into a solution. But we cannot predict the future growth of knowledge and this means attempting to control who gets the wealth would be to prophesy who will best find the solution. As with anything else - like “feeding the world” - leaving it to the “free market” or to the “individual” is the best way that innovation can occur. More wealth fuels more knowledge growth both individually and institutionally. But to forcibly extract wealth from individuals and institutions and concentrate it in a central place in the hope that a high concentration of wealth in a central location must be the best solution to any given problem is precisely the same error as concentrating all the rice at a central location so that it can be distributed fairly. It must fail because then there is less motivation for the production of rice in the first place if the central planner is the one to benefit (from siphoning off some amount or simply the feeling of power and privilege that goes along with being in control).

For whatever the problem is we cannot guess what the best solution is. The proverbial asteroid on a collision course may seem like it requires a global effort. So, such an argument goes, we must concentrate wealth into an institution that builds rockets to deflect asteroids. We have no other choice so we should begin taxing people now. But how do we know that someone, were they not taxed so much, would have the time to work on a system that deflected asteroids without the need of rockets? (A super intense pulsed laser system, say. Or not a rocket, but a nuclear-explosion powered bullet, or, and this is more likely: a solution no one had ever thought of before).

How do we know that only the government can solve a pandemic? Or is best placed to solve a pandemic? How do we know? How do we know that, when some large number of people are made aware of a threat and know to stay indoors (where sensible and necessary to do so without coercion) would not work at home on a cure on their computers of the future? Can we say that the best solution will not be a chemical cure produced on a quantum laptop checking all the ways viruses might adapt to particular treatments until the key was found to unlock the code that stopped the spread? How can we possibly guess that the individual is always less innovative (and hence less powerful) than the collective...than the government and all its guns? How do we know that extracting so much money from people now (and borrowing from people in the future as is now happening) that this extracts that solution from 10 years in the future and places it 100 years in the future? That Sally the computational virologist of 2035 might have found the solution, but will not because she has less time because she must work a second job to pay the tax to pay off the loan taken out in 2020? And how do we know the problem of 2035 was not, relatively speaking, small on the scale of things, but because of the scale of debt, seems impossibly difficult to overcome? The government is just one big basket collecting many eggs, none of which it produced and breaking many during the collection process.

Solutions are created in the minds of individuals. There is no collective mind. People may cooperate if they freely choose to do so and cross fertilization of ideas is a beautiful and necessary thing. But force and coercion are antagonistic to reason and imagination. The harmonic oscillations of society are driven by the creativity of individuals, but damped - sometimes critically, by the force of government. Government produces almost no solutions, but rather exacerbates many problems by dampening the individual. It is individual creativity that will solve the problems of the future and this is amplified by freedom including the freedom to trade in the free market where wealth creation is accelerated and knowledge is created at rates beyond what can be predicted.

This is not a mere hope. It is a fact of our circumstance demonstrated again and again by the ways civilization has risen from the dirt and the tribe, from out of starvation into abundance. It is shown over and again by the human desire to be free and create unfettered by the intrusions of authorities demanding we take on this task rather than what we are passionate about. It is the cry of the child who wants to learn to play electric guitar and not classical violin, or wants to perfect their streak on some computer game rather than be forced to learn algebra. It is the cry that says “I know best what I want to do and I will pursue this with a passion like no other”. But increasingly we are told not that collaboration is merely good (and no doubt it can be) but that you must cooperate with the authorities on pain of penalty. You must cede your will to the collective and your wealth as well. You must not use your reason for you do not know best: the authorities do. You are uncaring and unthinking if you do not think handing more of your wealth to the central planner to solve “the most important problems” is a virtue. You must obey.

A person wants to be free to solve their own problems. To do this they need to be able to create the conditions under which they can flourish and thrive. This means creating wealth. And this is all people, everywhere. The snide looking down at the “typical” person as an unthinking, unintelligent cog who is unlike the elite, who can and should decide for them what is best, is an impulse that comes from the tribe: from the chief and the medicine man. “You and I may be the thinking intelligentsia, but come on. The mechanic and hairdresser: they cannot be expected to be creative? The man who digs ditches? The cleaner? Be realistic. These people are not like us. They are not thinking grand visions, they are not contemplating philosophy and how to fix the world’s problems!”. We need to outgrow this. The problems of the world ARE THEIR PROBLEMS. Problems are conflicts of ideas and they are always parochial. The chief and medicine man are just other people too and if they know best, they can persuade us. But they should not point guns* each and every time a problem arises that they cannot see a solution to. When they fail to see a solution and thus call for the clamping down further on freedoms and the extraction of money from the future to pay us in the present, we need more people to speak up. To “respect” authority (because that is safe) but to question it. To object where it is still free to do so. More freedom is needed because freedom is the wellspring of knowledge creation and that leads to greater wealth and more wealth is always what is needed to prepare for an unknowable future. Of course it solves the problems of today but it is the problems of tomorrow we must be ready for. The more the free market - which is just plain old pedestrian freedom for people to do as they please with their time and money - the more they will innovate so that tomorrow the world is even more wealthy and thus better able to deal with the unending stream of problems. Because they are unending. It is not as if once we get through one crisis, tomorrow’s crisis won’t be worse. If today is R0 = 2.5 and the fatality rate 0.6%, who can guarantee that next week a new strain is not R0 = 25.0 and the fatality rate 60%? If some experts are to be believed this is not only possible but absolutely will occur should we survive long enough. But is THAT too a reason to have government ready with its guns to extract wealth to solve that eventuality? What if the asteroid appears next year? Or the tsunami? Or terrorism on a massive scale? There are many baskets, and many many eggs. But it is not the government that lays them. It is creative people who given more freedom, produce eggs at an ever faster rate and now and again, perhaps produce a golden one.

*End Note: Government is a gun. That’s all it is. Government’s sole function should be to protect private property rights. It should be there to step in and stop violence should violence break out. When reason fails, when your neighbour ceases to talk with you and starts throwing punches, the government is there to step in and protect you and arbitrate. Government should be there to extract out the violence form society so that society is free to find solutions to the most important problems. If government steps beyond this, it can only do so by raising a gun and threatening. If government says: I need $5 for NASA - this is not a request. It is a demand. If you say to the tax officer “I will not give it to you. My dog needs medicine” the government shows no favoritism. All are equal before the law. The government will have its $5. You will go without food or your electricity will be shut off. But it will have its $5 and should you still refuse to pay, it will be at your door. And if you refuse to pay your bill it will drag you away to prison (or to court). And if you refuse still by resisting the force will escalate. Guns will be drawn and unless you have one yourself it will kill you - even if only by not allowing you to leave you house so that you starve to death. This is government as it is. Ideally government could be something else. It could be just that entity that protects rather than protects and provides many other services. Because to provide those many other services it must be funded - and funded exceedingly well. And those funds must be extracted from people. And the rich alone are insufficient. All - even the least wealthy - must contribute. Which means all have less wealth. All have less capacity to transform their lives and improve their lot as fast as they might have. There is less diversity and less innovation. So many are concerned about the concentration of wealth in the hands of the most successful - in the hands of those that innovate the most and produce the most value such that we all pay them for enriching our lives (the Bezos’, Gates’ and Jobs’ of the world) but they do not see the irony in demanding the wealth be super super concentrated in the coffers of the government. If there has ever been wealth inequality it is between the wealth of the government and its citizens. And that wealth was not created but extracted at the point of a gun.